Francis Stuart
| Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 April 1902 Townsville, Queensland, Australia |
| Died | 2 February 2000 (aged 97) County Clare, Ireland |
| Occupation | Writer, lecturer |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Genre | Fiction, poetry, essays |
| Notable works |
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| Spouse |
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| Children |
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Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart (29 April 1902 – 2 February 2000) was an Irish writer. His novels have been described as having a thrusting modernist iconoclasm. He was awarded the highest artistic accolade in Ireland before his death in 2000. His years in Nazi Germany led to a great deal of controversy.
Francis Stuart was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia on 29 April 1902 to Irish Protestant parents, Henry Irwin Stuart and Elizabeth Barbara Isabel Montgomery; his father was an alcoholic and killed himself when Stuart was an infant. This prompted his mother to return to Ireland and Stuart's childhood was divided between his home in Ireland and Rugby School in England, where he boarded.
In 1920, at age 17, he became a Catholic and married Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne's daughter. Aged 24 years, Iseult had had a romantic but unsettled life. Maud Gonne's estranged husband John MacBride was executed in 1916 for taking part in the Easter Rising. Iseult Gonne's own father was the right-wing French politician, Lucien Millevoye, with whom Maud Gonne had had an affair between 1887 and 1899. Because of her complex family situation, Iseult was often passed off as Maud Gonne's niece in conservative circles in Ireland. Iseult grew up in Paris and London. She had been proposed to by W. B. Yeats in 1917 (he had also earlier proposed to her mother; Yeats was 50 at the time, Iseult 20) and had a brief affair with Ezra Pound prior to meeting Stuart. Pound and Stuart both believed in the primacy of the artist over the masses and were subsequently drawn to fascism: Stuart to Nazi Germany and Pound to fascist Italy.
Gonne and Stuart had a baby daughter who died in infancy. Perhaps to recover from this tragedy, they travelled for a while in Europe but returned to Ireland as the Irish Civil War began. Unsurprisingly given Gonne's strong opinions, the couple were caught up on the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) side of this fight. Stuart was involved in gun running and was interned after a botched raid.
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